Shocktober Revisited: Four Reasons Day of the Dead Get a Bum Rap

Between watching movies for "review" purposes* and working on essays, I tend to throw movies on before bed, parsing their running time out over a few days. The last such movie was George Romero's Day of the Dead, which has the reputation of being the "lesser" entry into his living dead series. Rather than give a full-on review, I thought I'd dust off "Four Reasons" and give you my take on why that reputation is undeserved, even if Day of the Dead may not live up to the lofty expectations from Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead.

1. Tom Savini at the top of his game + Greg Nicotero = Best Zombie Effects Yet: Tom Savini gets a lot of credit for his effects work in Dawn of the Dead but I've always found the "blue" zombies to be a bit distracting. They're also unintentionally silly, which lends itself well to the "comedy" parts of Dawn of the Dead but leave the menace of a world overrun by the living dead greatly diminished.

Thankfully, Day of the Dead (mostly) drops the blue-skinned dead in favor of more appliance work. Operating on the notion that these zombies have had some time to decay, Savini and Nicotero (later of KNB Effects) swing for the fences and craft some really elaborate and unique makeup jobs. One of the first zombies you see doesn't have a mouth at all, and they get crazier from there. Guts spill out, limbs are hacked off, and brains are exposed for research before the film ends. Oh, and then there's the death of Captain Rhodes, a kill echoed in Shaun of the Dead with Dylan Moran. The effects team bring their A-Game to Day of the Dead and for my money the movie has the best zombie makeup "gags" of the series.

2. Bub - Whether you love Land of the Dead or hate it, the central plot point (sentient zombies) doesn't exist without Bub. For the first time in any of the Romero series, the living dead have a face. Howard Sherman manages to keep Bub, the zombie that learns and "remembers" from feeling like a bad story direction without ever making him too human. Bub is still a zombie; he still eats flesh and is a threat to everyone in the facility (especially Rhodes). And yet, there's a glimmer of hope in an otherwise hopeless situation that the living dead are more than a mass of oncoming death.

Land of the Dead addresses this more directly (and some, including the Cap'n, would say more ham-handedly) by pushing the evolution of the dead in isolation further. The precedent Bub set in Day of the Dead allows Romero to pursue this idea, even if he bungles it a bit in the twenty year gap.


3. Desperation - This is where I disagree most with critics of Day of the Dead; many say that the film is nothing but people arguing for 90 minutes and then a zombie invasion to clean up, but I take another position. If you follow the progression from Night to Dawn to Day of confusion / survival / desperation (and take it further to "adaptation" in Land of the Dead), then Day is the necessary "dark" chapter in the series. It lacks almost all of Dawn of the Dead's cautious optimism and even the last second escape for Sarah, Johnny, and McDermott is more "now what" than Dawn's triumphant chopper ending.

Day of the Dead represents a pocket of humanity that sees an increasingly hopeless situation that they can't see a way out of. For the scientists, research is slow and equipment is diminishing. For the soldiers stationed to protect the scientists, they see men dying for what appears to be no reason. There's no outside world to contact and no Fiddler's Green to escape to, so they're stuck with each other, frustrated and underground. So yeah, I can understand tension bubbling over into Rhodes' profanity-laced tirades. His men are there to babysit people who seem to be doing nothing.

Day of the Dead might get a little too dark and the fights a bit too repititious (there is, after all, only so many things Romero can show us in the underground facility) but I find that the film returns us to the looming threat of a mass of undead largely missing in Dawn of the Dead. The film is a more extreme take on Night of the Living Dead's basement scenario and I think that it sobers the "fun" of Dawn of the Dead in a way people weren't expecting.

4. It's the last really good Romero "dead" film - Say what you will about Land of the Dead but I'd hardly put it up there with the "original trilogy." (The less said about Diary of the Dead, the better.) Day of the Dead takes great pains to expand the collapse of society that Night of the Living Dead sets up and Dawn of the Dead spreads, and even if the scope of the film was drastically cut, I think that Romero conveys the fall of man better here than in his subsequent films. If Land of the Dead was more about the world outside of Fiddler's Green, I might be more kind to the movie. That opening sequence was about as interesting as Land ever got, and it had more to do with what Day sets up than anything to do with the crew of Dead Reckoning.

I'm not saying that Day of the Dead is at the top of my "dead" list; in fact, it still ranks behind Night of the Living Dead and possibly Dawn of the Dead. That doesn't mean, however, that I consider the film to be Romero's red-headed stepchild of the zombie series. The film is nowhere near as bad as people like to say it is, and the effects are easily better than anything in Dawn, Land, or Diary of the Dead. The acting is a little rough, the movie is a bit repetitive, but I dig the dream sequences and thematically I find it to be quite consistent with what came before (and after). Day of the Dead gets a bum rap, but not one the Cap'n thinks it deserves.

Quick Review: The Shark is Still Working - The Impact and Legacy of Jaws

 If you're the kind of person who reads about movies online (and I certainly hope you are, because otherwise you wouldn't be reading this), you've probably heard about The Shark is Still Working: The Impact and Legacy of Jaws. Chances are you heard about it a few years ago, wondered if and when you'd get a chance to see it, forgot about it, heard about it again, then forgot about it again, and then recently heard it was going to be an extra on the 37th Anniversary Blu-Ray Special Edition of Jaws: The Movie That Ruined Summer Movies Forever.

 Is that a fair characterization of Jaws? Not really, but since it comes up almost every time people mention the slow decline in quality of "Summer" movies, in large part because people get tired of talking about George Lucas and Star Wars, which was the other movie where marketing and promotion factored in as much if not more than the film itself. Of course, Jaws and Star Wars are both entertaining movies that make movies like Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones look like the garbage they are. I chose those two films coincidentally, of course. If I had seen a Transformers film one could argue I should substitute that for either film listed above, but I haven't and won't.

 So before you badger me about getting off on a tangent about the relative quality of "Summer" movies today vs. 30+ years ago, it is worth noting that this exact argument figures into The Shark is Still Working. Not in great detail, because there isn't much in The Shark is Still Working that approaches the phrase "in great detail," but it is a fun and comprehensive overview of Jaws. And by comprehensive I mean that it covers nearly everything you might have ever wondered about Jaws.

  That includes a brief look into the making of (with some discussion of Laurent Bouzereau's The Making of Jaws), voice-over actor Percy Rodrigues' role in the trailer narration, Peter Benchley's book, the poster art, the locations used in the film then and now, the story behind the U.S.S. Indianapolis monologue, Steven Spielberg's reaction to not being nominated for Best Director, interviews with nearly every surviving cast member, crew member, and Universal pictures executives, Jaws Fest, memorabilia collectors, John Williams explaining the shark theme, a beach that uses the theme to warn swimmers to get out of the ocean, the film's impact world-wide, the marketing, what happened to The Orca (and The Orca 2), what happened to Bruce the Shark, how CGI would ruin Jaws, interviews with fans including Eli Roth, M. Night Shyamalan, Greg Nicotero, Tom Savini, Robert Rodriguez, Kevin Smith, and Bryan Singer, and tributes to Martha's Vineyard locals who appeared in the film (both living and deceased).

 This doesn't cover everything you see in The Shark is Still Working, which is narrated by the late Roy Scheider and features Steven Spielberg, Richard Dreyfuss, and Scheider prominently. It's quite impressive for a fan made documentary to manage to bring together nearly everyone involved in the film (especially since quite a few major subject are no longer with us) but I had the distinct impression that there was so much to cover but not enough time to give it all proper attention. As a result, The Shark is Still Working jumps around from subject to subject before viewers really have time to settle in on the significance of what's being discussed.

 Now, I'm not saying that The Shark is Still Working should be Never Sleep Again: the Elm Street Legacy. That's a four hour overview of the entire Nightmare on Elm Street series that covers nearly anything you can think of in detail. The Shark is Still Working is 101 minutes long and manages to cover many bases, and much of what director Erik Hollander and writer James Gelet find was new to me. I don't wish to diminish what The Shark is Still Working accomplishes, but my honest reaction was that it covers as much Jaws ephemera as humanly possible but generally speaking doesn't go into depth about most of it. It's a very entertaining documentary and has some fantastic interview subjects, and the footage of Spielberg watching the Academy Award Nominations is worth the price of admission alone. (Spielberg tries not to be upset that Jaws is nominated for Best Picture but not Best Director, and his faux-disappointment masks the face of a 27 year old genuinely feeling slighted for his efforts).

 Getting back to where my review begin, the concept of Jaws laying the groundwork for Summer Blockbusters (including the repeated statements of Smith, Roth, Singer, and Shyamalan that emulating Jaws' impact weighed heavily on their own careers) is in The Shark is Still Working. But like many other elements of the Impact and Legacy of Jaws that bear more investigation, it only touches on the issue. The Shark is Still Working may not end up as the "Be All, End All" documentary about Jaws, but it is a fine conversation starter. Considering that you get this and Bouzereau's The Making of Jaws as extras on the Blu-Ray for a movie you should be buying anyway, that's a pretty good way to see The Shark is Still Working after all these years.

Retro Review: Lost Boys - The Tribe

 (editor's note: The Cap'n realized there was a series of Blogorium posts from 2008 that never made the transition from our old stomping grounds to the new one. As a result, it seemed like a good idea to share some other reviews that had been otherwise "lost" over the past four years).


Insert Joke about Vampire Film "sucking"

In ten years, nobody's going to be defending Lost Boys: The Tribe. No one is going to be watching it again, for one thing, but even if some curious teenager decides to double feature the first and second film (we'll get to the possibility of the third film further down), odds are they'll find The Lost Boys far more compelling then its anemic sequel.

    Lost Boys: The Tribe works very hard to mimic the structure of the original, down to recreating classic moments from the first film. The big problem is that none of it is very interesting. It turns out that if you try to retain the atmosphere of a film from the 1980s but remove all of the wardrobe, music, and cheesy haircuts, things don't work. Rap metal and excessive profanity don't actually qualify as "updating" the world of Santa Carla.

    The cast is uniformly bland,  which kills any interest in the vampires. In The Lost Boys, Keifer Sutherland was so much more interesting than Jason Patric that you wanted to see them drag him into the night. In The Tribe, all of the vampires are surfers who say "fuck" and "dude" a whole lot and like to stab each other because they can't die. And videotape it.

    The leads are vanilla, at best. Going by the names, I guess they're supposed to be loosely related to Corey Haim and Jason Patric's Emerson family, although that's never addressed in any way. They have a "kooky" aunt that's meant to fill in for the mother and crazy grandpa, which results in the worst callback to the original film at the end.

    Corey Feldman, who really ought to be the one thing this film has going for it, is a total bust and he can't help it. Feldman's voice aged a lot faster than the rest of him, so Edgar Frog sounds like a fifty year old in the body of a twenty something. In The Lost Boys, it was kind of clever that someone as young as the Frog Brothers could be experts on killing vampires, but when you add twenty years, it's just kind of stupid. Ideally you should push this world further down the line and have someone like Nick Nolte playing a much older Edgar Frog (ala Kris Kristofferson in Blade). Feldog just don't have the heft to pull it of.

    I never thought I'd say this, but director P.J. Pesce is no Joel Schumacher. There's zero visual flair in this movie, unless you count borrowing shots from the original, and even those look more like ripoffs. The script by Hans Rodionoff, when not speeding its way through the plot of the first film (the transformation from human to vampire is no longer a gradual thing but instead happens over the course of a few hours) is busy making unnecessary pop culture references. The Goonies one I was willing to ignore, but the extended Big Lebowski name dropping really irked me.

    Oh, and there's the pointless opening with Tom Savini who agreed to be in the film as long as he only had to work one night. Look for a really weak retread of his From Dusk Til Dawn character at the beginning of the film.

    Ultimately, there's not a lot of reason to watch Lost Boys: The Tribe. While I don't remember seeing The Lost Boys when it came out (I would've been eight), I did watch it on home video six and seven years later and throughout high school. Even removed from the 1980s, it was still an entertaining movie with "kid" protagonists, Mouth from The Goonies, Bill from Bill and Ted, the old man from Tron, and that strange cover of "People are Strange". As I got older, I came to appreciate Edward Herrmann, Dianne Wiest and Kiefer Sutherland. And the fact that despite being the idiot who made Batman Forever AND Batman and Robin, Joel Schumacher had once upon a time made a decent movie or two.

    Lost Boys: The Tribe has none of that going for it. I don't think I'll be watching it again. I find it hard to imagine there'd be a nostalgia for this particular era, so it's hard to imagine anyone wanting to revisit the "aughts" with this film.

***
Spoiler-ish Alert, if anyone was still thinking of watching this.

    Finally, let's discuss the actual ending; not the one where they kill the head vampire surfer moron, but the one during the credits where Corey Haim's name inexplicably appears right before Corey Feldman's. Normally, that'd be a "what the fuck?" moment, but since the music fades out, we can guess there's something coming.

    Sure enough, Edgar Frog is sitting under a lone spot light talking into the darkness, saying things like "cut the theatrics! I know you're there." Then we see a shadowy Corey Haim, looking much worse for the wear (nearly unrecognizable to be honest). They hint at some kind of history between the first Lost Boys film and The Tribe, and then they say some really cheesy stuff and attack each other. Cut back to the credits.

    Alternate endings on the dvd carry this thread further, but suggest that Edgar Frog's brother Alan (Jamison Newlander) is now a "Master" vampire and is coming back to exact his revenge on the Coreys. Either way, we're being promised a third Lost Boys movie that has all the makings of being MUCH worse than The Tribe. Tell you what, gang; go find Jason Patric and get him involved, because if you're going to pursue a continuation of the original film using people willing to come back, then you might as well grab him too.

Spoiler for the Day: Friday the 13th - The Final Chapter

 In what is a VERY inaccurate subtitle, Tommy Jarvis shaves his head to look like Jason, then lets him slide his mongoloid face down a machete before chopping the holy hell out of Jason's head. It is implied that Tommy is not as crazy as Jason, which takes us to the first "unfortunate" Friday the 13th films.

 Tomorrow's Spoiler for the Day: Friday the 13th - A New Beginning

Horror Fest Retro Review: Friday the 13th - The Final Chapter

 Welcome to a special October edition of Retro Reviews! All month long I'm going to showcase some of the best reviews from Horror and Summer Fests of the past. To kick things off, here's one from the very first Horror Fest, devoted to what is arguably my favorite Friday the 13th film - The Final Chapter.

When Paramount decided they needed to kill of Jason Vorhees once and for all (the first time), they did it right, bringing back Tom Savini to finish the job he started with Friday the 13th.

The movie begins with a nice recap of the first three Friday movies, hitting plot points and showing off the best kills from each one (including the Betsy Palmer decapitation) and then picks up right where part three left off, with Jason "dead" in the barn from a machete to the head. The cops bag him, tag him, and take him to the hospital.

But of course, this is the beginning of the movie, not the end, so Jason can't be dead. And to make sure, we need to see him dispatch some horny hospital workers and escape unseen from wherever the hell this hospital is. Where to? Crystal Lake, of course.

This time we're on the non-camp side of the lake, though, near a cabin and its nearby rental house, where our prerequisite stock cast of idiot teenagers have just arrived, fresh for the slaughter. Now, we know we're off to a good start when we see Crispin "Dead Fuck" Glover (and his wicked hot dance moves), but then we get the skinny dip twins and some useless hunter free of charge! What luck!!!

Jason dispatches them in varying degrees of awesomeness (including but not limited to: hatchet in the chest, knife in the back of the head, implied dog homicide, thrown into car so hard it explodes, and speargun to the junk) and then moves on to the family renting the house out and their quaint (and window loaded) cabin, the Jarvises.

Now, we can't talk about Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter without discussing little Corey Feldman is Tommy Jarvis, a boy ingenious enough to sneak into Tom Savini's workshop and steal all of his gags. Young Tommy also spies some teenagers getting it on, and a whole mass of people skinny dipping. (Between this, The Goonies, and The Lost Boys, is it any wonder this kid ended up so screwed up?)

Tommy is mostly around to give us something other than dead teenagers, hitchhikers, dogs, and parents to look at, until the end of the film, where he goes bat shit crazy, shaves his head, and kills the shit out of Jason. And I mean that.

There's a nice little coda implying that the trauma of what Tommy did may drive him to be like Jason, but for Mr. Vorhees, this is the end of the line... right?

Well, since this is part four and there are (to date) ten Jason movies, I think you can figure it out, but The Final Chapter does mark the last time we see Jason as mutant survialist killer. From here on out he's either a copycat killer or Zombie Jason, who isn't good at absorbing damage but is instead just undead, and accordingly doesn't feel pain. For that, and many other layers of awesomeness (and "Dead Fuck" Glover substituting for a door) Friday the 13th: the Final Chapter, is a high water mark for the series.

I'm going to fit in one more movie here and then it's off to a Halloween party for a while (don't worry, there's still going to be a VHS playing so I can come back to movies) but later tonight, you can expect updates on Slither, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, A Taste for Flesh and Blood 2, Hostel, and, if you're lucky, Chopping Mall.

Summerfest 3 Day One: The Burning

"This movie could stand to have a lot more burning in it" - overheard during The Burning.

My eyes were drooping, my mind was fading into sleepville, but the Cap'n soldiered on. The promise of early Weinstein brothers Miramax slasher action was too much to pass up on. The Burning needed to be seen!

Or did it? Strangely, summer camp movies rarely make it into the Summerfest lineup. We've yet to watch a Sleepaway Camp film, and Friday the 13th's tend to find their way to Horror Fest, so The Burning provided us with what we assumed would be a happy one-two punch: a summer camp slasher movie from the golden age of slashing (the early 80s) and gore effects from arguably the F/X guy of the era - Tom Savini.

And while the story of Cropsy the groundskeeper was, um, compelling, there's a lot more "summer camp" than slashing in The Burning, and even less burning than you'd assume. Campers decide to pull a prank of Cropsy by sneaking a skull full of maggots into his cabin, which then manages to burn down the entire building and Cropsy in the process.

Then, for no good reason, we jump ahead a week (and then five years) while Cropsy (that's his name. nothing else) is healing in a hospital suspiciously close to Time's Square, so that he can roam the seedy streets, find a hooker, and kill her with gardening shears. Or maybe not. He kills most of the campers with garden shears, which he leaves behind (where does one find that many pairs of garden shears, anyway?) when he leaves the city to return to a different camp populated by kids that had nothing to do with "the burning" (oh! I get it... but wait, there's burning at the end to... where did Cropsy get that flame thrower?)

At this point, we abruptly leave the slasher film and move into Meatballs territory for a while. I hope you were looking forward to awkward teenagers wandering around and worrying about pervy Alfred and rape-y Eddy, who tend to get picked on by Glazer, camp counselor Todd and all of the girls. And lest I forget to mention him, Dave, the provider of contraband, is played by Jason Alexander. He's younger, svelte-er, and unfortunately more than willing to moon the camera, so Seinfeld fans get ready.

In fact, I need to take this opportunity to mention that The Burning launched the careers of many A- to B+ list actors. For example, in addition to being the first movie Jason Alexander was in, it's also the first film for Larry Joshua (Dances with Wolves, The X-Files), Fisher Stevens (Short Circuit, Bob Roberts), and Holly Hunter (Raising Arizona, The Piano). Somehow, it managed not to be their last film, which I suppose is a testament to the Weinstein brothers' ability to wrangle up and coming stars into d-grade slasher movies.

I could go on about how this summer camp has a tendency to leave the younger campers behind while the counselors take a rafting trip to an abandoned mine and fight a blowtorch wielding Cropsy (to be fair, he kills most of them before Todd and pervy Alfred use irony to finish what the other campers at THE OTHER CAMP started).

To be fair, the gore is pretty good. I mean, it's no The Prowler (which really only had gore going for it) as Savini-effects go, but he finds just enough to do with a pair of garden shears to keep us interested (which is about all you get, since Cropsy's mangled, melted visage is obscured until the very end of the film). When the body count gets going, Cropsy does a surprising amount of mass murder (the raft assault is rather impressive), but there's the whole first half of the movie where the audience inexplicably needs to be embroiled in the lives of preteens that are far more normal than one would expect in a slasher film.

We were hoping for a twist in this movie, and Nathan was convinced that we were in for a My Bloody Valentine-esque "Cropsy isn't Cropsy but actually Todd," but it was not to be. Scarred, horribly melty-faced Cropsy had an elaborate plan for revenge that he carried out on people who didn't have anything to do with "the burning" and in the mean time there was plenty of softball activity, skinny dipping, and exposed Jason Alexander ass. It's exactly what we needed at 3 in the morning!

Phillippi gives The Burning three severed fingers out of five, while Nathan is pretty sure he won't be watching it again.


Thanks to tonight's Summerfest 3 Groovie Ghoulies: Englund, Phillippi, Nathan, Riannon, Domenic, and Chris. See you tomorrow when we venture into the world of Ghostbusters, Death Beds, and Cook Out Adventures!

Also, stay tuned Saturday for the special McGangbang Challenge!!!